Saddle Hunting for Caveman

With limited options for getting close to a target buck, a saddle was able to open the right door.

By Landon Jenkins – Bowhunter

Honestly, since I was a young boy, I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with the bow and arrow and with hunting whitetail deer. When I was seven years old, my dad bought me my first bow — an Xi Silverhawk XP — and I was hooked from that moment. Fortunately, my home state of Virginia has plenty of deer, so over the years Dad and I were able to enjoy many great bowhunting adventures.

But as a teenager reading countless hunting magazines and watching more than my share of outdoor TV, I began to dream about making a trip to the Midwest’s Cornbelt. When I went off to college, my time and funds were limited, but I still figured that somehow I’d make it happen. In 2008, while in my senior year, one of my professors asked me to be a lab assistant for one of his Wildlife Biology classes that fall. I’d be super-busy that semester, but I said, “Sure thing, sign me up!”

Turns out, I ended up meeting one of my best friends in that class, and the door to the Midwest opened up for me. Grant Wallace was two years behind me in school, but we soon found that we had a shared passion for bowhunting. Before long we were swapping hunting stories and sharing photos, and I realized that he was as crazy about hunting whitetails as I was. And his family owned a farm in Ohio!

Grant invited me to come up and hunt with him in the fall of 2009, so I headed off the first week of November — no windshield GPS, no iPhone mapping app, just MapQuest directions telling me how to get there and back. Let me tell you, for this small-town kid with limited traveling experience, that was a big deal for me. And, boy, did we have the time of our lives! CLICK HERE TO READ FULL STORY